


After Siberia

by toniwilder



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Steve Rogers Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 03:26:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9638864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toniwilder/pseuds/toniwilder
Summary: Steve hadn’t been surprised when Tony lunged for Bucky, but he had been surprised when Tony started shaking—when Tony recognized the feed almost immediately on Zemo's TV.A rendition of what possibly happened after the fight in Siberia.





	

              The shield absorbed vibration, so when Steve Rogers dropped his iconic weapon, it made only a resounding thud against the echo of Tony’s cry.

              “My father made that shield!”

              That was true. Howard Stark had made that shield, and other scientists helped make the serum that gave Steve his strength, and Tony made the upgraded suit, and the past had built him into a hero, and the future had turned him into a villain. Captain America was made of hundreds of parts, and something about that felt extremely democratic in its structure--near poetic--but one of those parts in Captain America was Bucky Barnes. That part of him merged and churned with the parts made with Howard Stark. When the two parts fought, Bucky always won.

              Steve could never argue it, never wanted to argue it. He dropped the shield and took Bucky, the other man made up of recycled parts on the less heroic end of the spectrum, and they hobbled out together.

              Tony had survived a cave in Afghanistan with far less at his disposal. Despite how kosher it didn’t feel, especially when the Iron Man suit scraped metal knees against the Siberian concrete and clawed lines into the thick of the foundation behind him as he left, Steve knew he wasn’t doing anything that Tony couldn’t handle, or didn’t expect, at this point.

              Tony Stark was Iron Man. Every part of his heroism was ingrained in his DNA and made of himself—maybe that’s why he burned so much to prove he was accountable to the world (as though the world didn’t already spray paint his visage on slum walls and headstones with the best of dictators).

              Steve Rogers had never really been Captain America. He took to it like he took to everything else. As long as standing in those shoes perpetuated a vision of heroism that couldn’t be achieved without it, he would wear them. Now the shoes were tainted, the shield had been made by murdered men, and Steve had to make a choice.  The ironic choice, considering all his talk of being where he needed to be while using the moniker of a superhero. Now he chose to walk away, and not Iron Man or Thunderbolt Ross or War Machine or Black Panther or anyone else could make him stay.

              Bucky slumped against Steve with barely discernible shakes rippling across his muscles. Fighting Tony had been like fighting a wall, metaphorically and literally, and no doubt Bucky would be feeling the emotional drain by now too after having his arm ripped off.

              If Steve hadn’t smashed the arc reactor, Tony probably would have killed him for trying, just like he almost had to Bucky.

              It tasted like real hypocrisy to Steve to fault Tony for being protective of his trauma with Bucky slung around his shoulders, so Steve didn’t try to fault anybody. He left Tony Stark in the crypt, and only stopped his path back to the jet when he saw T’challa standing over unconscious Zemo.

              Something in Steve sparked with rage at the sight of a man who treated men like toy soldiers. Steve couldn’t stand puppet masters anymore. He took a step forward, toward Zemo, without thinking.

              T’challa stepped in front of Zemo, claws out, and stared across the white terrain at the two men, lost in time. Steve paused. The wind blew white scraps of snow through the air at them, and a distant part of Steve felt cold. Bucky hadn’t stopped shaking, so it was hard to say how much of him was suffering from the biting wind and how much of him still felt the adrenaline from staring down the weaponized gauntlet of a man with more than a few passing similarities in their pasts.

              “Stark?” T’challa asked across the opening.

              If T’challa expected only the living party to walk out of the abandoned facility, he hid his surprise well when Steve said, “He’s inside. The suit is dead.”

              “And he is…?”

               “Alive.” Steve turned away from T’challa. “Whether he wants to be or not.”

              T’challa’s claws disappeared just as swiftly and quietly as they had appeared. It wasn’t until Steve and Bucky had cleared a few more yards before T’challa called after them.

              “I am sorry.”

              Steve paused. Bucky made a sound like a laugh against his shoulder, but it was wet and jumped like a cough. Steve adjusted him and turned his head to look at T’challa, a man with nobility he couldn’t find even in the alienness of someone like Thor. Despite that, even from so far, Steve could spot sincerity in every word he didn’t say—every gesture he wasn’t making.

              “So am I,” Steve replied.

              Sorry for leaving Tony in a heap of grief, for hiding behind a shield and cowl while telling others to stand their ground, for not stopping the fight long enough to explain himself. Why hadn’t he just explained himself? Why had the fear been so suffocating with his teammates? He always said they had to fight together, but fighting was only one part of it.

              After nights filled with dreams of antiquated heroism and affirmation, and nightmares of when those things faded, sometimes Steve looked in the mirror in the morning and checked for loose threads in his skin where his neck met his collarbone. He waited for the day he could pull back the epidermis and expose his dirty, red, skull. To look every bit the hypocrite he felt like.

              He thought of Tony, wide-eyed and on the verge of hyperventilating before the mask came down and the anger tipped out and the Iron Man was at their throats. Thought of Tony weeks before the fight and the Accords, talking excitedly about the new therapy and then the day Steve caught him with his head halfway out of a trashcan in a hallway. Vision hovered nearby and said, in a voice that made Steve forget he wasn’t Jarvis after all, “Mr. Stark?”

              “It’s fine,” Tony had assured. “The therapy is just a little hard on the hippocampus. I had to try it before letting some unsuspecting shmuck wear it, y’know? I’m thinking of calling it BARF.”

              “What hypotheticals were you working through?” Steve didn’t stop to think about the dry tone, or how Tony’s façade should have stopped short of convincing him. (Another regret in a long line.) Sometimes it was hard to forget Howard, and even harder to forget how much of the Howard he saw in Tony was reserved for parading and distracting. “A long-lost conquest?” he teased.

              To Tony’s credit, he smiled and gave a signature shrug.

              “I’ve lost a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to choose.”

              Vision smiled awkwardly, looking between the two with eager confusion at being involved. Steve, who always liked to toe the line of possibly too-cryptic humor, only said, “Better narrow it down before you fill the trashcans.”

              And Tony had laughed! Some ridiculous part of Steve thought that was the sign of a man who had coped with his parents’ death—who didn’t benefit from dragging it all up again. He saw Tony Stark emptying his guts in a garbage can and thought closure had already been had.

              Steve hadn’t been surprised when Tony lunged for Bucky, but he had been surprised when Tony started shaking—when Tony recognized the feed almost immediately on Zemo's TV.

              Steve was no better than the men who made a list of words to manipulate Bucky with. His eyes flickered down to Zemo, still unconscious on the ground.

              “I am not your enemy,” T’challa said after the long silence. “But I will not let this cycle continue. Do not come for him.”

              “I won’t,” Steve decided. He couldn’t deal with Zemo in that moment. He found that he was only, inexplicably, sick of him.

              T’challa nodded just barely, almost like a twitch.

              “If he lets you, please help Tony,” Steve blurted before he could stop himself. Bucky tensed against his side. “I don’t think he flew a jet in.”

              “I will try.”

              Steve turned away again, and this time T’challa let him leave for the jet. He settled Bucky in the back of the jet. Careful not to jostle him, he moved slow and creaked with the bending of his knees. When he finally unattached himself from Steve, Bucky's fingers reached absently at the empty spot at his side—where the metal arm should have been.

              “I don’t remember them,” Bucky mumbled. “I wanted to remember them. He wanted me to remember them so badly.”

              Steve’s heart ached.

              “I know, Buck.”

 

* * *

 

 

              A body in motion stayed in motion.

              With that in mind, Tony Stark grabbed the concrete siding and stood up in his dead suit.

              He placed one hand against the wall, leaned his back against it, and reached the other hand up to his reactor. It felt wrong to say he was “immensely glad” for the suit’s vibration suppression—he couldn’t say he felt glad of anything in that moment—but there was at least the knowledge of understanding the ache in his chest and the shake of his muscles set on repeat couldn’t be amplified by the clicking of metal gears and panels of the suit.

              The room filled with silence—a state in which Tony wasn’t used to existing in. No FRIDAY, no music. Nada. Nothin. Zilch.

              His earpiece had flown off in the last bit of the fight, and tearing through the room over and again in the suit sounded like a really good way to exhaust his already depleted energy, even with his exoskeleton suit. He pressed his fingers into the manual switchboard and the suit unfastened obediently. Tony stepped out into the cold with only his leather jacket standing in the way of the brittle Siberian tundra and his bruising skin.

              His teeth chattered as Tony limped across the room.

              “FRIDAY,” he lifted his voice to say, "Get loud."

              Tony scanned the room, stepped over each piece of debris and hoped to Christ that the earpiece hadn’t fallen out in the middle of one of the collapses. He didn’t make a point to consciously step around Cap’s— _Steve’s_ —shield, but it wasn’t on his list of places to check first and he'd leave it until he absolutely had to deal with it.

              With the stealth of his namesake, T’challa didn’t make himself known in the room until he was already by the wall closest to the shield.

              “What are you doing?” he asked.

              Tony jumped as much as he could with his injuries and freezing nerves. When he looked to T’challa, the king’s gaze was illegible, and Tony only received a thorough onceover for his trouble.

              “I—ah…” Tony scowled. His voice wasn’t ready for this, his nerves weren’t ready for this, and, out of everybody on the planet, T’challa wasn’t on his shortlist of people he wanted nearby when the panic crept in. “I lost FRIDAY.”

              T’challa’s eyebrows furrowed only a fraction.

              “My AI,” Tony said. He looked around. “The earpiece fell out somewhere in here during...”

              “During the fight," T'challa finished for him.

              Tony paused as much as he could while he still shook like a maraca. He stared across the threshold at T’challa, who acted as though he already made his whole mind up about everything that had happened in the room. Why was he even here? Had he come for Barnes?

              Tony’s lungs tightened.

              T’challa pushed himself away from the wall and paced the room, following the indiscriminate sound of wherever FRIDAY’s voice was coming from. Tony turned his back to him, pressed his arm into the side of the wall, and tightened his eyelids together his eyelashes were made of screws.

              “They left,” T’challa told him.

              “I don’t care.” But the voice that said those words was cracked like his lips were getting, and wet like the back of his throat felt. “Let them.”

              T’challa said nothing else. He didn’t seem to like men like Tony, and it wasn’t as if Tony could much blame him after the way things had gone.

              Just when he thought T’challa had left, a hand pressed into his shoulder and another one appeared with an offering of his lost earpiece.

              “It was by the shield.”

              Before he could stop himself, Tony had twisted around and was staring at the shield that plagued his childhood in sepia toned portraits of the project his father held above all else. His best creation—at least, before Tony came along to continue The Stark Legacy, he was told.

              Tony didn’t want that shield or a legacy or Steve Rogers or T’challa.

              He took the earpiece and shoved it into his ear.

              “Sir?” Friday was saying. “Sir, should I call for transportation?”

              “Call Pepper.” The words dissolved into something snotty and breathless. Tony tried again. “Please, call Pepper.”

              Pepper answered on the second ring.

              “Tony?” she said. “I’m at the hospital with Rhodey. What happened? What’s going on?”

              “Pep, oh _God_.”

              T’challa left Tony alone to talk to Pepper in his half-truths and near-sobs and only returned once Tony’s breaths had reached a level of somewhat even ratios.

              They never discussed it explicitly, but T’challa still organized a drop point at the hospital where Rhodey was being treated. Pepper waited on the helicopter pad for them and T’challa watched from the helicopter with vague curiosity at the way she held him like he’d disappear if she ever let go. Tony only heard the helicopter shut off when he melted into Pepper’s arms, buried his nose into her shoulder, and gasped into her hair like it was his oxygen.

              “Oh, Tony,” Pepper murmured.

**Author's Note:**

> While I always appreciate the emotion associated with fanworks, I am not here for demonizations of any character in any universe. I enjoy feedback regarding what I've done, and while I understand that Civil War is a charged film in the MCU, I believe that Tony and Steve are multifaceted characters who deserve care and admiration in their respective ways. I forever hold to the idea that the "team iron man" and "team cap" dynamics were played out and oversimplified, and Civil War remains a heart wrenching film due to the fact that Steve and Tony were friends, and they both have their own truths and perspectives that allow them to exist on either side of the fight.
> 
> Long story short: I will delete comments on my works that I think are ornery or cruel to any character described in this fic.


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